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“I love cold calling!” Said no one…ever. What if I told you AI can be used to automate this process? I’m sure you’ve heard AI will be the next big thing to hit business, but how does it apply to commercial real estate? Let’s discuss the two things you hate doing the most – cold calling and emailing. How can we use AI to automate this without breaking the bank? The answer may surprise you!

Gathering a Cold Call / Email List. Renomoy allows you to build and export an Excel spreadsheet of building owners filtered by location and/or property type. Do you want a list of all the multifamily property owners in Baltimore? Renomy can pull those leads and export them in a matter of minutes. These spreadsheets include contact names, phone numbers and emails which can be plugged into your automation.

Tenant information. Consider using InfoUSA to pull business owners and managers. I highly suggest the use of a sales agent instead of their automated process. A sales agent will be much more adapt at filtering and pulling exactly the leads you want without too much waste.

Automate Cold Calling. Do you pride yourself on 50 cold calls a day? How about 50 cold calls in 1 second? I know you are imagining a robotic voice selling timeshares over the phone; hit 1 to be transferred to the call center. That doesn’t work for commercial real estate, but Direct to Voicemail does. Envision recording your sales pitch and blasting it directly to 100s of voicemails all at once. You can get a month’s worth of cold calls done in 10-minutes. The phone won’t ring, it simply leaves a voicemail – your lead has no idea you didn’t call personally. Yes, it works with both cell phones, landlines and direct business numbers. I like Voicecasting, it’s shockingly inexpensive (3-cents per call) and works like a charm. Go ahead and tell your broker you made 600 sales calls this month. He doesn’t need to know you did it in 10 minutes and with less than $20!

Automate Cold Emails. Those of us who have suffered through cold calls were excited at the idea of cold emails. It’s so much easier to copy-paste, add a name, write an extra sentence for personalization and hit send. After 50 cold emails I’m not drinking cold milk and trying to sooth a voice box that feels like an inferno. Much easier! However, the process is still time consuming and impossible to keep straight. You find yourself constantly wondering, “Which Mike is this?”

I won’t lie to you, cold emailing is a numbers game. Most experts agree that you need to be sending at least 20 cold emails a day with consistent follow-ups. Who can possibly keep up with all the data? This is where automation shines.

All hail Lead Fuze! Lead Fuze has an awesome feature that allows you to pull leads from their system. Their leads are mostly owners and employees by title, industry, etc.. If your game is tenant rep, this can be a very helpful feature. However, if you are focusing on property owners and landlords, you can import your Reonomy list directly into the system and setup your automated emails.

Setup is easy! You can set Lead Fuze to send to 25 emails each day (so you won’t be overwhelmed by response), a follow-up email 2 days later, another follow-up email 3 days after that, etc. etc. until you have an email drip program to your liking.

Track who opened, clicked and responded. Use tracking data to judge which people to follow-up with a call or mailer. With this system, you won’t waste time or money on leads that aren’t interested. Pause a single person’s email drip or add additional information to a single email for extra personalization.

The best part? Lead Fuze is not expensive. It only must bring in one small transaction a yearfor ROI. Those are pretty good odds!

Make 2018 the year you start using AI! The commercial real estate industry is often a late adapter to technology, which gives you an advantage over the herd. Staying on top of the newest services will keep your business efficient and increase sales. Automate as much work as possible to leave your time open for important business.

I create commercial real estate websites that are lead generating machines. Bring in leads while you sleep with our Lead Generating Website! Check out my 5 Steps to a Killer Lead Generation Website for tips on calls-to-action, follow-up automation, generating traffic, trust-building on the internet and more! Automated lead generation is achievable, I can show you how!